Tag Archives: dataliberation

Orbital Feed Reader 0.1.9 Codenamed “BORN FREE” is out!

Dev, Software, wordpress, ,

Last night I pushed out the final changes to uncage version 0.1.9 and get it out in the wild.
MAX LAZER tears off on his own to explore Oregon

This version is mostly about giving you freedom. You should be able to easily import your stuff from other platforms into Orbital Feed Reader to use it. If you decide that you don’t want to use Orbital Feed Reader any more, you should have an easy way to leave. Any software that doesn’t tell you how to leave it is something you should be suspicious of.

Get Feeds IN

Share your OPML

For Feed Readers, the standard way to exchange lists of subscriptions is a standard called OPML. It’s an old format, but it’s how they all exchange lists of feeds. I’ve buffed up the OPML import to handle larger numbers of feeds. After you import the file you have a chance to look over the feeds and edit them, tag them or exclude them entirely. Hit save and they’ll all flow into the backend.

 

Get Feeds OUT

But we also don’t want Orbital to be a lobster trap for you. If you import that kind of data I also want you to be able to export that kind of data. Now Orbital is good at exporting your feeds. If you are logged in – we’ll export a file with all your public and private subscriptions and let you take that wherever you want. Some folks want to share their OPML publicly – if you aren’t logged in, hitting the same URL gives you only the public feeds. All your private stuff should stay safe!

Read Lotsa Feeds

Now that Orbital can handle tons of feeds coming in I wanted it to be easy to actually sort through them. Feed Tags now start off collapsed and you can expand them anytime by using the little twiddlers next to each. That’s a technical term. The twiddlers make it much more manageable to see 200 feeds over many subject areas.

How to Migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Pals, wordpress, , , ,

W

ordpress.com is great. They’ve got a great freemium model that allows anyone to get hooked up with a blog with the swiftness. I’m a huge fan, but of course there are limits in what you can do when you don’t have your own hosting.  They have limitations on plugins and themes and so on.
I recently helped my friend Tove Hermanson migrate her thoughtful fashion blog to her own hosting. I recommended she choose Dreamhost, as I’ve had a great experience with them.
We had a few setbacks when we did things out of order, so I’m writing up a short guide to doing this so it will be easier for other folks. If you still are unhappy after following this guide, you may need a different hat.
First things first, you will want to export information out of your old blog. Log into your blog and do the following:

  1. Note your theme so you can install it at your new hosting 1
  2. Note what plugins you are using, and any widgets or whatnot you’ve got on your blog.
  3. Note your link structure. How are your posts organized? You definitely want this so you don’t break any old links to your content.
  4. Log into your blog at wordpress.com and export your blog contents to a file.
  5. Get your images. WordPress.com says that you can import your images and such at your new blog, but we didn’t see the full sized images getting downloaded. Hence, I’ve written a script to get all of your full sized images from your wordpress.com blog.
    1. Download and install Python and BeautifulSoup.
    2. Use my python image spider to collect all of your images from your blog and put them into a neat little bundle for you.
  6. Do a find and replace on your export file to change all your img tags from “yourdomain.files.wordpress.com” to “yourdomain.com/oldimages”
  7. Buy your domain and hosting.  As before, I really like dreamhost, as they are cheap, cheerful and easy to use.  For a personal site, those are the factors that matter.   Clicking those links will give me a 10% kickback, but I’d recommend them even if I didn’t get a taste.  2
  8. Switch your domain nameservers to point to your new hosting.  When you are buying your hosting, they will have instructions on how to do that.  The place where you bought your domain name will also have a way for you to switch where your nameservers point to.  If you are using dreamhost, you’ll be using NS1.dreamhost.com, NS2.dreamhost.com and NS3.dreamhost.com.
  9. Install wordpress at your new hosting. If you’ve chosen dreamhost, they will do it for you.
    1. From your control panel choose “Goodies”
    2. Click “One-Click Installs”
    3. Advanced Mode (It isn’t all that advanced>) and follow the instructions.
  10. Log in to your new wordpress installation and import your blog export file
  11. Configure your themes, widgets, url structure and so forth through the wordpress settings.
  12. Use an FTP client like Filezilla or FireFTP to upload your “oldimages” images folder to your server, right under your new domain’s root directory.
  13. Take a look at the new blog and test! You should be good to go.

That seems like a lot, but you can probably accomplish all of this in an hour or two. You’ll spend some time waiting for DNS changes to propagate, but it should be fairly seamless. The key is to extract all of the information you need from your old website domain before you change your domain url to point to your new hosting. We made a few mistakes doing that and it just takes forever to switch back and forth.

Good luck, hope these instructions help!

  1. Tove had Chaotic Soul which seems to have major problems and differences between the official version and the one wordpress.com uses.  (back)
  2. You could always register with dreamhost without my referral as well.   (back)